White Balance and Colour

All the usual settings you’d expect are included on the Pentax K-3 II including AWB, Shade, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten Light, Flash, CTE and Manual, as well as four Fluorescent Lighting options. There’s also the option in Custom Menu 2 to automatically adjust white balance, even when the light source is specified.

This means the camera can fine-tune the white balance to compensate for small differences between similar types of artificial light. Users can also adjust the bias of each white balance setting between blue, green, amber and magenta, should they want to.

Colours are punchy and true-to-scene

See more images taken with the Pentax K-3 II in our sample image gallery

Colours outputted from the JPEG images are true to scene, rendering rich tones as vivid as you’d like. Occasionally, when shooting bright subjects such as flowers, the processing can deliver too much saturation and it’s worth tweaking the settings to taste.

Default JPEGs can be excessively vivid, but the different colour modes can help you to get your images looking just right

To add a little more punch, users can select one of the colour profiles featured on the K-3 II. Landscape mode gives a little more vibrancy to blue, red and yellow, delivering tonally rich skies. There are also settings such as Vibrant, Radiant and Cross Processing that deliver saturated images. For more subdued effects, the Bleach Bypass and Muted modes work well and, among the few other modes remaining, there’s also an effective Monochrome setting.